


Skin

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Banter, Bartender Remus Lupin, Folklore, Forests, Frottage, M/M, Mutual Pining, Non-Explicit Sex, Norwegian Mythology & Folklore, RS Fireside Tales, Runes, Shapeshifting, Superstition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-08-13 23:39:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16481951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Sirius Black is a shapeshifter with a penchant for conflict in a town that believes he’s brought in the worst kind of fate. His neighborhood has begun catching wind that he doesn’t always go on just two legs, and things are starting to get dangerous.Remus Lupin is a barkeep with a deeply-kept secret, and luckily almost nobody but him goes to the woods beyond the river after dark when the moon fills up like pearly poison.Butalmostnobody doesn’t bode well for secrecy. And again—things are starting to get dangerous.Sometimes a dog has to run with the wolves to save his skin.Written forRS Fireside Tales 2019





	Skin

**Author's Note:**

> All my love to Gloom and Muse for putting Fireside together! I had a great time weaving this story out of the fog and loam—I hope you enjoy reading it just as much ^^
> 
> Many thanks to G for the fantastic beta read <3
> 
> Inspired by [>>this<<](https://tinyurl.com/ybzsb8js) great prompt that sparked my imagination immediately.

 

_ Now Garm howls loud | before Gnipahellir _ __ ,  
__ The fetters will burst, | and the wolf run free;  
_ Much do I know, | and more can see  
_ __ Of the fate of the gods, | the mighty in fight.

_ —Refrain from  _ _ Völuspá (Poetic Edda); the hound Garmr’s howl heralds the coming of  _ _ Ragnarök.  _

_ ——— _

Sirius Black gasps around his own air as a flare of light bursts behind his eyelids. 

It isn’t the first time he’s been cornered by uppity neighbors, looking for conflict like flecks of gold in the paltry river of their salt-stained port town, panning and panning and “Fuck off, mutt-master,” there’s another kick to his kidneys as Rosier comes up with his find; “Take your fucking hound somewhere else,” Avery’s snarl bright and shimmering yellow, vulgar; his wand forgotten where it fell in the gutter after the first punch thrown as his toe connects with Sirius’ ribs. Sirius wheezes in what tries and fails to be a shout. 

He hadn’t meant to be cornered by the two cross-the-street squatters but here he stands—lies. Lord knows he’s been good enough at sticking to his own shadows for the better part of a month. Perhaps this was overdue.

It’s his fault really, if Sirius takes the time to think between the fizzling rips of pain from his neighbors’ boots— _ Honestly, lads, don’t know why you aren’t using spells, _ the wit he could fire if his mouth wasn’t too busy being pulled into a gritted grimace around the taste of his own blood. It’s all his fault. He’d been too eager for a drink and couldn’t wait until daylight, slipped up and took the wrong road _ , _ and now he’s paying for it. Sirius curls in on himself when Rosier’s heel digs nastily into his stomach. He could shift now into the dog if he hadn’t a single qualm about his own mortality, bury his teeth into one of their legs and ribbon it up handsomely before the other cursed him to pieces. 

_ Is it easier,  _ Sirius thinks distantly,  _ to murder a man when he’s an animal instead? _

“If I see that fucking beast again, you’re dead,” Avery spits, and then truly spits—it lands thick on Sirius’ cheek, fetid with tobacco residue—as Sirius smirks to himself with the irony if his internal musings. He sees Avery’s glower deepen. “What, is that  _ funny?” _

“No,” Sirius wheezes. He tries to dredge up more of a comeback, but Rosier’s crouched next to him and pulls him by the hair to face his gaunt, patch-bearded mug.  _ Ugly bastard, unfortunate set of teeth too. _

“You think armageddon’s a fucking joke? You think bringing that creature into town is going to  _ do _ something for you? Fucking outsider,” Rosier hisses. Sirius feels blood dripping from his nose and can faintly see the shape of the green-flamed streetlamp reflecting in the man’s dark and sunken eyes. There’s something very much like fear in there as well, deep behind his pupils, and Sirius almost glances at the shape of sympathy deep in his guts. 

Almost. 

Sirius had come to the town in flight, ever a drifter in time’s wind. Several years ago saw Sirius stricken from his family name when a foray into transfiguration went perfectly right by his own count but disastrously wrong by his family’s. His mother’s voice had pealed sharp like the bells of Saint Paul himself— _ An absolute mongrel, somehow made yourself into more of a disaster, nothing to offer but scandals. Get out _ . Forced to the road, sleeping wherever he could catch it and spending just as much time on two legs as four, Sirius had found the sea to the northwest. Smelling of foggy black-sand beaches and the nearby black pine forest, black as his name and black as his hair, it had fit with humor just as black; he rented a slim little rowhouse in this small town, close enough to several pubs and far away enough from the city and his family and their spidering, cancerous influence that if he closes his eyes in the sinfully early morning he can almost forget who he is.

Nobody knows his history here and he liked it that way for several weeks, until he discovered that superstition runs far deeper on the coast than the roots of corruption ever did back home. Here, he was almost as anonymous as he wants to be. But as a hound, it’s just his Black luck that he’s hell incarnate. 

_ Garmr. _ It had sounded at first like a drunken slur around too much ale, shouted after him as he skittered to a stop in front of several locals sharing a pipe during his second night venting energy as the hound.  _ Garmr is down from the forest!  _ The sight of several men scrambling for their wands had been exciting once in Sirius’ boyhood dueling circuit days, but from lower to the ground it was suddenly terrifying. He had bolted, spells spraying up on the cobbles at his paws with every bound, only losing them in the narrowing alleys beyond the town proper. Slinking home later as a man, shaken;  _ Garmr _ . Hellhound. Omen. Sirius had felt the first prickles of apprehension as he fell asleep, affronted and curious and uneasy all in one strange feeling. He had never known transfiguration to be feared, but then he had never known anything outside of metropolitan decadence. These people think he brought a portent down from the pines with his arrival, and no amount of outreach Sirius could ever chance at attempting will change that. 

He would have liked to feel comfortable by the sea, but as it stands Sirius is on edge near seventy percent of the time. He had wanted to find a place where he could melt into the background, wander and amble and eat and sleep and fuck howsoever he chose, and the facade of this place has been cracking steadily since his arrival. 

Cracking, like the sudden sound of two new arrivals to the midnight street. Sirius only gives it half his attention, still staring through a bruised eye socket into the depths of Rosier’s glare—decides hazily that replacing fear with fury is a piss-poor way of going about life.

“Auror’s Office, freeze and step apart!”

Rosier dodges a whizzing cerulean bolt of Stupefy and drops his hold on Sirius’ hair, lurching away, drawing and twisting his wand in one movement to drag himself back and off with another sharp snap as Avery lands one last punt to Sirius’ shoulder and does the same. Sirius coughs shallowly, spits blood to the ground,  _ Shit and shackles, _ he hurts all over; tries to sit up, fails, settles for rolling to his back and squinting up at the laden full moon in the sky as he pinches the bridge of his nose to staunch its bloodflow. 

“You alright?” A boyish voice from a boyish man, curling red hair skirting the high collar of his uniform as he looks warily down at Sirius. Sirius manages a weak thumbs-up as a second officer steps into his field of view. 

“Aurors Weasley and Potter, evening,” all authority, dark eyebrows knit in the middle as he crouches to take Sirius by the elbow to help him up. “We’ve report of someone firing off a disarming spell, was that from you or them?”

“Me.” Sirius’ voice is crimped by a wince, and he proffers his wand to the ginger Auror without preamble. Familiarity with sweet-talking the peelers is something he remembers acutely from his teenage years, but he’s no desire to twist anyone else’s nerves tonight. The officer takes it and pulls a short thread of spell history from its tip with a practiced gesture. 

“You a healer?” The winnowing white-blue spell names hang in the air before Weasley, or Potter, whichever one the redhead is, backwards to Sirius as though catching it in the mirror;  _ Expelliarmus, Episkey, Ferula, Lumos, Ferula, Ferula, Tergeo. _

“Just accident-prone,” Sirius rasps. The Auror’s glance flicks to him thick with doubt, but he charms the spell log back into Sirius’ wand and passes it over to him without pressing any further. 

“Do you need somewhere to stay until morning? There are overnight bunks at the Ministry,” The dark-haired Auror asks, a hazarding tone, and Sirius believes from an outside perspective he must look a proper mess of himself. Battered, out late, halfway to drunk, blood spackling the clothes he tries hard to keep looking as fresh as possible but has a harder time doing lately when he gets roughed up three nights out of seven on a good week. He wipes carefully at his nose, tests at the blood with the back of his hand and finds it staunched. The Auror—his nametag above a well-decorated set of service ribbons declaring  _ J. F. POTTER,  _ a solid name, a name that stands up straight and calls you  _ Sir _ —passes him a handkerchief that Sirius accepts gratefully. Even little gestures in this town feel like somebody moving mountains for him; that fact should seem more tragic, he’s sure, but Sirius will take the small kindnesses where he can get them. 

“Cheers, thanks, but I rent a flat nearby.” Sirius watches as the Aurors look at one another with the brief flash of professional conference that clearly says  _ Poor sod. _

“Do you want to press charges?” Weasley asks. He’s already drawn a notepad and enchanted quill from his breast pocket, but Sirius holds up a hand and shakes his head. It makes his neck hurt, makes him wince, makes his neck hurt again. 

“Nah. They’ve probably cleared their own spells by now. Wouldn’t be worth it.” His consonants feel pinched and blunted around the clotting in his nose as Sirius watches the Aurors trade another glance. 

“Fair enough,” Potter says crisply. He draws a card from the inside of his sleeve, bleach-white against the dark scrim of nighttime and glowing faintly with that incessant blue aura of everything the Auror department deigns to touch. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to write. We see a bit of this town every now and again.”  _ JAMES F. POTTER, AUROR. PAGE BY OWL TO MINISTRY HEADQUARTERS LEVEL TWO — BY HEARTH TO HEADQUARTERS CENTRAL.  _ Sirius pockets the card and nods his thanks, knowing he won’t reach out. 

“Countryside is never as quiet as the poetry wishes it were, eh?” Weasley jokes, earning a commiserative snort from Potter and a half-hearted smirk from Sirius beneath the drying gore from his nose.  _ You don’t know the fucking half of it. _

The Aurors apparate out with tidy jots into the sky, leaving Sirius with a bloody handkerchief and a vague sense of bitterness mixing with the tang of blood at the back of his tongue. Turning up his collar, dabbing once more at his nose before cramming the smeared cloth into his pocket, slotting himself into the tall shadows of back alleys columned by shuttered homes like looming statues, Sirius returns to his excuse for a home on Dour Court that feels less and less like home each time he returns to it. 

—

Remus Lupin gasps around the morning as sunlight fades in behind his eyelids. 

Naked, damp, scraped and exhausted with an all-too familiar heaviness in his limbs but no pangs of serious injury—he runs a mental check on his body, lying supine on the wet forest floor, a branch above him dripping its collection of dew and leftover rain unevenly onto his shoulder.  _ Feet, ankles, legs, hips; torso’s fine, wrists, fingers, arms, back, neck, head. Good. _

Remus sits up slowly and squints at the thin shafts of daylight starting to poke through the ink-thick cover of the treetops raking to the sky above him, knifepoint canopy made of needles that carpet the ground where they fall. No birdsong ever joins him in the forest, north of the town and probably cursed,  _ certainly _ cursed with the way the people mutter about it beneath their breath and into the drinks they nurse nearly nightly in Remus’ pub. 

_ Garmr.  _ Hound in the forest, wolf in the town’s collective nightmares, creature of the end-times; Remus’ personal and eternal passenger. Just his luck.

He’d been bitten as a boy—out-of-the-blue, out-of-the-black, out-of-the-southern-woods behind his father’s house by a dog who looked friendly at first but had nearly torn him in half when he pulled on the beast’s tail with a child’s curious yank. Hurting, healing, back to a full recovery within several months but with a fresh fever that made itself more and more severe with each full moon by which Remus was gradually plagued with the ritual of transformation. He became the wolf in full for the first time on his tenth birthday—a skinny and useless little pup of a creature, but unnatural nonetheless. It grew quickly to the size of something dark indeed. From there, he began the steady and herculean task of conquering adolescence with a bone-deep secret atop all the rest of its hurdles. He had always tried his best to cover it and only failed after twenty-odd years. 

Standing now as silently as possible, Remus lets his muscles sigh into waking while he winces gently around the movement. The transformations are never inherently painful, just terribly inconvenient. Once a month he has to shut the pub, slink away down to the coastline, get across the old stone bridge without being seen, and then hole himself up in the forest to run and vent the manic canine energy that floods him from moonrise to dawn. The townspeople are too afraid to even look at the bridge full-on, but Remus still takes aching pains for utmost caution. He’s been run out of one village already after a slip-up and doesn’t plan on striking another from his life’s map after three years of a solid stay here. It’s quiet and it’s bitter and it’s more than slightly lonely, but it’s a place to call home.

Remus walks on noiseless feet and reaches the hollowed tree where he folded his clothes before sunset last night—frowns at them when his touch finds them slightly damp, shakes a translucent little spider from the arm of his sweater, shimmies into his trousers with the jangle of his belt buckle pockmarking the tomb-quiet like moth holes in curtains. He wipes another splot of water from his nose when the tree above him sways in a slow breeze and shivers its collection to the ground. 

Quiet. Bitter. More than slightly lonely.

Dressed and starting to feel the chill of half-sunrise, Remus takes the long way down the overgrown trails he’s learned like the lines of his own palm. Across the bridge, immediately down into the lower alleys, west into the true thick of the buildings and finally across the empty excuse for a town square to his pub. The Thirsty Dog—previously owned by Albus Dumbledore, the only person Remus knew in this town when he needed a place to take root after fleeing home—had been left to him two short years ago in a too-short will at the end of a too-short life. It remains all that Remus truly feels he owns. Besides the press and slide of loam beneath his paws once a month, the pub is all that keeps him grounded enough to stay from floating away. 

Remus shoulders open the front door and trudges past the interior entryway to wrestle again with his keys in tired fingers, sliding the triple set of locks undone, stealing a moment of peace to lean back against the door when he shuts it behind him and sighs the leftover night out of the sky with all the wind left in his lungs. He conquers the stairs, unlocks another platoon of deadbolts on his direct flat entrance, and begins shedding his clothes again as he pulls the knob to with one hand. Remus seeks his bed as he seeks the ground on full moon midnights, full-bodied and groaning gently into it.

His dreams, when he finds them, are smoldering black—slumbering black, stilled black—in the spaces behind his eyes where colors rarely dance. 

———

Sirius’ reflection bends in the glass of the pub door as he reaches to push it open. His top lip is still nicked with a split at one of its bow peaks and his left eye has the hint of a yellowed bruise left beneath it—his middling skill at healing magic can only take him so far. He thinks briefly of how this morning’s repair has added to his spell log with more evidence of his disrepair;  _ Tergeo, Ferula, Tergeo, Tergeo, Tergeo. _ Always cleaning up his own fucking messes. 

The interior is warm and dry, welcome contrast to the autumn fog outside, pinking Sirius’ cheeks to surround him with so much of what he lacks in Dour Court. It’s as though The Thirsty Dog is charmed from the inside-out to pack more comfort into its eaves than the little building should fit at first glance; soft light, the hum of conversation, the smell of food, the pretty barkeep. 

The maddeningly lovely, staggeringly handsome, not-enough-words-in-Sirius’-lexicon-for-him, barkeep. 

Sirius doesn’t know the man’s last name but in his own opinion after five weeks of subtle staring, Sirius has decided that Remus defies the need for titles. He runs the pub with all the expertise of a tight ship—not that Sirius has ever left land, but his imagination prefers to do wondrous things with the coastal proximity. Charmed glasses and the odd broom clean themselves and keep everything tidy, candles flare with coziness in overfilled chandeliers made of dark wood overhead, overstuffed chairs and well-worn stools sit welcome like expectant therapists ready to let one unload into their drink; Sirius prefers to still keep it all shut tight. He drinks nonetheless. His libido isn’t used to waiting, only ever seeing and wanting and fucking in the same night, but this strange dance of avoidance he’s struck with Remus feels strangely...comfortable.

He had locked eyes with Remus for the first time last month and immediately seen a flash of flintiness in that mossy stare that betrayed something dormant; something deep beneath the man’s cable-knit sweaters and soft-looking curls skimming his eyebrows. Sirius had to work at the words  _ Brandy, neat,  _ twice before they emerged properly, and even then his voice had felt deflated by an exhausted sort of wonder. Remus had smiled at him then as the brandy bottle poured itself into a shallow little glass and floated across the bar—Sirius was glad to have the chair beneath him for the jellied riot the uneven curve of those well-formed lips started in Sirius’ guts.

From there, Sirius was utterly snared. 

He had never been particularly predisposed to losing his head over men. Ever since the first clumsy foray into his own proclivities with his cousin’s date to a dinner party when he was fifteen years old—all elbows and knees on the balcony while adults were busy talking coups and the girls were gossiping in the drawing room,  _ Here, then; you’re too handsome for her, I think,  _ mouths sloppy and insistent but waking something fierce and undeniable in Sirius’ spirit, liking far more the way it felt to press another boy back against the tangle of the climbing ivy than it ever did to imagine doing it to a girl—Sirius had spent the last decade fucking his way through England with anyone who didn’t know his full name. He’s failed to ever feel the telltale sensation of the ground slipping out from under him from any of them, the sweet death of his sanity and vocabulary, the sort of shit he would read about in his cousins’ poorly-hidden diaries about those boys Sirius would end up sucking off later seven times out of ten. His relationships were always fast and catastrophic, ruined equally often by the other man’s discovery of his family ties as by his need to keep moving and push himself further and further outside of the reaching radius of London he could constantly feel on his shoulders like rot—if he could even call half of them Relationships. 

But Sirius has learned over time what he likes and what he dislikes in a man. And Remus is consistently adding to the column things he likes  _ very  _ fucking much. 

“Take a fall down the stairs?” Asked with a grin not quite on his lips but certainly behind his eyes, those brilliant eyes; Remus tucks his wand behind his ear, the one with the half-moon freckle on its lobe, and wipes at the bar rack with the rag from his back pocket. Sirius bites down on a stupid grin if his own with a punishing sip of drink and his good cheek on his fist to sigh dramatically. 

“The ‘stairs’ cornered me by the docks. I held my own though,” Sirius insists and bodily ignores the sting still sitting in his ribs. He’s told Remus before, carried away with a twinge of tipsiness, about the way his neighbors tend to jump him ragged. He’s been able to pass it off as a symptom of living on Dour instead of the truth behind  _ Cheers, everyone thinks I’ve brought the apocalypse here with me. _

“What is that now, twice since Sunday?” Remus asks with a slight frown at the glass in his hand—Sirius’ lungs flex with affection and he wishes he didn’t feel it so deeply—“Look out for yourself, doesn’t do to keep on like that.”

_ I could shred them on four legs but you wouldn’t understand.  _ “I’ll manage.” Sirius fixes him with a smile he hopes is suave, would even do with halfway to the description, winces and ruins it when the movement pulls uncomfortably at the bruise under his eye. Regardless, he catches Remus’ cheeks go the slightest shade pinker before the man turns to the liquor cabinet and begins to rummage through it.

Distantly satisfied but holding the sensation at arm’s-length for the desire to keep things undisturbed, Sirius counts his paltry blessings. He flounders in his own foreign fucking feelings and sets to his drink like the rest of the townspeople counting their hours around him. 

—

_Fuck._ Remus hadn’t counted on being caught unawares by anything Sirius did anymore. He’s taken utmost pains to lock down his stupid, errant, blatantly foolish attraction to the man who comes in more often than not with some sort of bruise or scrape or— _Who are you to talk, you wake up every twenty-eight days with the forest written all over you._ He feels his face flush again as he aimlessly rearranges the gin bottles. 

Sirius— _north star, dog star, isn’t it funny how life laughs at one’s fate? Go on four legs, fall for the man in the leather jacket named after your favorite constellation as such, Ha Ha Ha_ —has the dregs of a black eye that shouldn’t look alluring and yet it _does,_ curls around his cheekbone as if it’s smeared lipstick; a fist’s claim like a kiss on a face more striking than marble and he smiled through it, swaggering Lazarus, to push at all the more disastrous edges of Remus’ resolve. Sirius also has a half-repaired split lip and still looks four times the picture of perfection, still looks so utterly ripe for the taking that the lupine leftovers swimming in Remus’ blood ache to launch across the bartop, topple them to the floor, whether to fight him or kiss him or fuck him Remus can’t tell but he can feel it pooling heat in his pelvis nonetheless.

A blind pour of the bottle in his right hand goes into the shot glass he takes up with his left, down his throat to shut down the thought—nearly chokes on limoncello that stabs at his windpipe like lighter fluid. Remus’ eyes water as he holds in a cough, hopes nobody else saw that.  _ Fucking reign it in, Lupin.  _

Remus is used to being the picture of calm. That’s what his father always said when he was a boy,  _ How lucky it is you’re so calm outside the moons. Would be harder to hide without that, eh? _ It used to rankle him, the assumption that he was placid, but he found that made it easier to drift under the eyes of his village as he got older and wanted to start exploring himself outside of the wolf.

The first girl he fancied was named Ingrid and her brother’s name was Leo, from a sturdy and attractive family of Muggles down the lane when Remus was sixteen. Remus had kissed them each within three months of one another, behind the old shed left forgotten at the edge of his family’s land; Ingrid was soft where Leo was solid and Leo was rigid where Ingrid was pliant, but they were both so lovely that Remus had found it easy to be calm and keep his secrets solid between the triangle of them. He had them both biblically by the time he turned seventeen without either of them the wiser, a week apart with the high of conquest hot in his blood between each tryst—Ingrid let him use fingers on her while she used her hands on him, and Leo spent deep in Remus’ mouth before Remus spilled his own in the grass at his knees. Almost immediately after then he had quit seeking them out, as though sex with both of them had completed something at his core; sated, strangely satisfied, and done with the pretty siblings he’d gotten running unknowingly under one another’s noses like a pair of amnesiac cigars. It was easy to move on and let himself get lost in other people at further and further reaches of the village then, and through it all Remus was almost surprised at his ability to remain calm. Calm, calm, calm.

But Sirius does not make him feel calm. Instead every time Remus watches him enter the pub it feels as though something very near to the wolf begins pushing at the panes of his guts, howling behind all his curtained windows for Remus to let it through, let the beast bound out and devour Sirius the way it very much feels like every one of Remus’ instincts wants to; wants to drink in this man who smells of leather and bonfire smoke and something so subtle it nearly makes Remus’ heart ache, wants to swallow him whole— _ Keep it down, Remus.  _

Remus opens a tap aggressively into a pint glass and nearly snaps it in half. He forces his breathing into evenness.  _ Keep it down. _

The door creaks open and ushers in a man and a woman, pill-sweatered, shadow-eyed, the man with his arm over his companion’s shoulders, both laughing nastily at the tail end of something as they cross the threshold. Denizens in from Dour no doubt, the place Sirius calls home for whatever godforsaken reason he chooses. Perhaps it’s money? But a man with a face like that doesn’t fall on bad times for long, of that Remus is sure. Looks at the high-bred conviction in those grey eyes, the flat plane of his brow—

Currently glaring death and blood over the rim of his glass at the man who just entered. 

Remus watches the exchange with the expert removal of barkeep-in-the-wings that he learned from Albus, drawing his wand casually down from behind his ear and into his sleeve. He’s only had to dispel a brawl twice since taking over the pub and he nearly lost an ear during the last one. He doesn’t relish the possibility of babysitting his customers, but he doesn’t let himself frown about it. 

“Evening.” The man’s voice is just as parched-sounding as his skin looks, pulled too-tight over a face carved sharp by more slings and arrows than Remus might ever know even with an ancient curse writ into his marrow. He looks directly at Sirius with the sort of stare that says  _ I Win. _

“Cheers, what will you be having then?” Remus replies, announces, knowing the man isn’t addressing him but still feeling a fierce and tugging need to protect Sirius.

_ Protect.  _ Remus hasn’t protected somebody a day in his life. Bloody fuck, he truly isn’t himself these days. 

The new arrival looks at Remus with a pinched scowl, seems for a moment that he wants to skin Remus standing, and Remus feels his guts contract with rare and minor terror at the malice rolling off those pupils. The man glares back at Sirius instead with his back teeth grinding. “When’s the storm coming then?” he demands. “You planning to hole up somewhere while you let Ragnarok sweep us all off?”

“Fuck off, Avery, I’m just here to drink.”

Remus’ eyes flick, watchful, between the two men as the basso of Sirius’ voice hisses his bid for peace. His pale fingers are tight round his glass but his back is straight—unblinking rampart against this sour man, suppose Avery is the one who punched him? 

“Where you keeping it then, letting the bitch wait in Dour til you’re ready?” Avery bunches a fist around the back of Sirius’ jacket collar, and anger singes the tips of Remus’ nerves. He doesn’t know what to do with that besides pour a deep whiskey and set it on the bar with a  _ thwack _ that’s perhaps a bit loud.

“On the house. Do take a seat.” If Remus snarls around his words, nobody remarks on it. 

The rest of the pub is blind to the exchange but the woman in alongside Avery coils back up under his arm, puts herself between him and Sirius, and takes up the drink—tosses back a sip with an expectant look at her man; “Thanks kindly,” she says shortly, only glancing once at Remus with a shrike’s stare before she tugs at Avery’s elbow. The man’s mouth twists into the ugly combination of a glower and a grin, and he lets go of Sirius before he twitches his fingers into a crude symbol on his forehead as he spits on the floor at Sirius’ feet; only then does he let the woman peel the two of them off into the pub to find a seat far away from the entrance. 

Remus feels the wind go out of him to see the symbol in Avery’s hand that he’s only seen twice before in his life; old magic, the sort born from bone dust and blood in a pestle dish—first when his father had tried to chase the curse out of him as a boy amidst the chaos of his first partial transformation, again when the old woman who ended up chasing him out of his village saw Remus emerging naked from the woods the one morning he let his guard down.  _ Peorth _ , the rune of primal law, meant to make his innards boil and drag the wolf out if his body like a skein flopping inside-out. Throughout his life Remus has done leagues of reading about the folk magic meant to plague his kind into the dirt, and luckily for him the old gods have long gone silent and won’t wake to act on runic spells even with the proper sacrifices. Still, seeing the ancient curse now resonates with Remus’ innermost fears and makes him remember the disaster of being discovered with a fresh pitch of nausea. 

But it wasn’t directed at Remus. Avery had undoubtedly pointed the affront at Sirius, for whatever reason. As the charmed mop wobbles over to take care of the ugly gob of spit spattered on the floorboards, Remus decides not to let himself be rattled by old memories.  _ Nobody here knows you’re anything but the barkeep. It will stay that way. _

“You’re liable to scrub a hole into that glass.” Sirius is offering a weak smile when Remus looks up him, lost in thought again with a rag and glass in his hand he hadn’t even realized he picked up. 

“Maybe I want it that way,” he replies, childish with a sniff to cover the tremor of sweetness that roots into his veins with the honest humor that spreads into Sirius’ expression. Sirius sighs almost inaudibly and takes a sip of brandy that he swirls in his mouth for a moment in a slow roll while Remus reshelves the shining stout glass and tries to tell himself he hadn’t just imagined the shape if Sirius’ tongue behind his teeth with that, seen a flash of fantasy with that very tongue against his skin.  _ Keep it down. _

“Sorry about all that,” Sirius says once he swallows. 

“No worries!” Remus’ voice is quick and too-bright but he can’t take back the vigor in it so he decides to let it be as he leans as casually as he can on the bar across from Sirius. “If I was bothered by every sorry-looking drinker who came around, I would be the unhappiest sod from here to across the Atlantic.”

Sirius’ eyes flash with something shining and sharp and pleased, and Remus wants to chase it like a scent. “Not very many others around to contest that there, in the middle of the ocean. Unless you’re meaning to encounter angry merpeople?”

Remus white-knuckles the bottom lip of the bartop and prays distantly to whomever might be listening to keep him from unraveling. He puts on his best attempt at a smirk and rolls his sleeves up his elbows as a short stack of dirtied glasses charm themselves into the sink at the other end of the bar. “Oh, only the angriest.”

_ Keep it down. Keep it down. Keep it DOWN. _

———

Sirius stirs with a gentle prod to his leg. Through the fog of his misty half-sleep, coming in scraps like the brush of damp pine needles against his face as he sprints endlessly through the thick of the forest, he hears himself grunt and try to nudge it away. 

_ “Wake up, Sirius.” _

His eyes flicker madly behind his pupils, fighting to focus as a second figure sprints in alongside him in the hazed shapes of dreamscape. Brassy curls reflect mottled sunlight in scattered throws as they catch it in lances coming down through the treetops, and the panting breath of his companion builds beside Sirius as they crash through the forest paths. Around fallen branches, swatting aside low-hanging whips of pinecones, sailing over rotten stumps in leaps that feel like flying—Sirius feels his breathing knit into that of the man running beside him, golden skin bared, green eyes flashing, heavy puffs of air echoing through his inner ear as though he’s in Sirius’ skin, in his bones, in his lungs, and—

_ “Come on, Siri _ us, get up.”

Another nudge to the side of his thigh, focused to a dull point like a dowel rod—it  _ is _ a dowel rod, attached to the end of a ratty broom held upside-down as Sirius blinks his eyes into focus and squints up the length of the broomstick. Remus peers down at him warily. 

“Morning.” Sirius’ voice creaks around the flex of cold, warming charms worn off, shivering slightly as he shifts himself into a more upright seat and wipes a hand down his face. “Are you sweeping an alleyway?”

“It’s part of my building. And it’s hardly morning, it’s a quarter to twelve in the afternoon.

_ Morgana’s tits,  _ Sirius had slept clear through sunrise. He’s been far more exhausted lately than usual. “Who the fuck sweeps an alleyway?” he demands, doing his best to deflect Remus’ attention when he finds a slight quiver of embarrassment in his guts.  _ Well what did you expect? You slept less than twenty feet away from his own pub, you fucking numpty. _

“I the fuck.” Remus flips the broom upright and shuffs its balding head at a small pile of dust and rubbish to push it into the gutter a couple paces away. He glances down at Sirius still leaning groggily against the crates behind him. “Get up, come inside.”

“Why?” Waking stubbornness is, as ever, Sirius’ most shining achievement.

“So I can feed you and keep you from freezing your jollies off.”

“Language,” Sirius groans as he hoists himself into a stand. His leg muscles protest loudly in pangs of tension, and he stretches with a slow pull through his entire torso. 

Remus sighs lightly, clearly meant to be inward, but the stillness of the alleyway and this corner of the town as a whole before nightfall makes it echo against the brick walls crawling high up above the two men. “Do you want food and a hearth or not?”

With perfectly obnoxious timing, Sirius notices the light clouding of steam at Remus’ lips as he speaks into the frigid daytime air just as his stomach twists with a garbled squelch to signal the very hungry pit he’s made for himself without dinner beyond the brandy from last night.

“Lead on,” mumbled, flippant, obviously doing a terrible job of covering his relief as he watches Remus bite his lips together to contain a righteous grin. He nods his head back toward the entrance to the pub as Sirius follows, forcing his stiff muscles to cooperate for just long enough to find a seat that isn’t made of cobblestones. 

—

Remus bodily ignores the impulse to look over his shoulder as he replaces the broom on its stand behind the bar. He casts a series of charms to set the coffee pot a-pour and the kitchen awake to fry another serving of the sausage and toast he’d set for himself already and tries not to think about serving breakfast to the man he’d been mooning over all of last night, even after Sirius left just before midnight—feels the tops of his ears go pink when he cordons off the  _ very _ vivid memory of wanking himself into a surprisingly intense oblivion made of the shape of Sirius’ lips, the twist of the light behind his eyes, the feeling of what those hands might do, fingers digging into Remus’ thighs as he—

“Cheers.” The still-groggy voice from Sirius behind him makes Remus nearly jump as he turns to see the man tipping him thanks by a chipped old mug filled with black coffee. He’s lounged back in a grateful-looking sprawl into one of the overstuffed booth chairs just across the bar in front of the massive fireplace that’s set itself to a cozy smolder, and the posture of it makes the man look as though he owns the empty pub. Remus wonders distantly whether that sort of inner surety can be taught or if it’s simply bred into someone.

“No worries, so long as I don’t find you icicling in my alleyway again,” Remus says quickly. Too quickly? Sod it, he’s hungry. He didn’t sleep well—never sleeps well. 

_ “Your  _ alleyway,” Sirius mutters to himself with a secretive little smile, shaking his head as though he’s chuckling at something a child has claimed before sipping on his coffee. His eyes flutter shut and Remus watches the short vulnerability of relaxed pleasure take Sirius’ face for just a moment. “Bloody fuck, this is good coffee.”

“Beans straight from Colombia.” Remus’ blithe inanity feels professorial, but he ignores it as the plates of fry-up float themselves out of the kitchen and onto the table before Sirius. Remus takes up his own coffee and sits down across from him, the pallor of the man’s skin a bit healthier now in the spelled ambient warmth of indoors; his black eye is still healing there, yellowed and blotchy but fading, and Remus frowns into his mug.  _ You don’t know anything about him besides ‘Gorgeous,’ and now you’re feeding him for free. Could be dealing drugs, could be a squatter, could be a fucking murderer.  _ But murderers don’t tell somebody to fuck off instead of fight them in a pub—do they?

“Where do you stay?” Remus asks the question without entirely meaning to, and he only looks up to meet Sirius’ look after the man bites into a loud crunch of toast. 

“Dour,” Sirius says around the mouthful.

“I know, but you clearly slept in the alleyway—”

_ “Your _ alleyway.”

Remus counts himself lucky that the smarmy grin Sirius throws across the table is so charming. Himself  _ and  _ the apparent struts of Sirius’ pride.

_ “My _ alleyway,” he amends tightly. “That isn’t Dour, that’s Outside-The-Pub-You-Left-At-Midnight. Were you there all night?” Remus sips punishingly at his coffee when his mind decides to add  _ Could have invited you up for a hell of a romp! _

The corners of Sirius’ eyes tighten, and he takes his time slicing a sausage in half before answering. “Yeah.”

“And?” Remus sits back in his chair with his mug in both hands, feeling incongruously parental with the way he reminds himself of the nights he used to come home late faced with a disappointed father throughout a short wild streak of late-night escapism when he was seventeen.

Sirius looks at Remus square-on and points to his residual black eye, missing it by a few centimeters without being able to see but still making the direction of it obvious. “My neighbors don’t like me. I’m not from around here,” he explains flatly. “They think I’ve brought some sort of curse with me, and they make sure to beat the shit out of me every once and again to see if that might chase it away. You saw Avery last night, fit to fight if his girl hadn’t been with him?” Sirius bites into the sausage half with vicious accuracy, snapping its casing tidily with his front teeth. “Didn’t feel like going back to that and punching or hexing my way past a crowd of fucking yokels to get to my own d—yes, for at least last night, your alleyway was a better option.”

Remus watches Sirius tuck back into his breakfast and gives in to his own bite of dry toast. The other man’s voice had begun to bleed around its edges with the frayed vestiges of a very posh sneer before he cut himself off, and Remus is lightly fascinated by it rather than put-off. “You could have asked to stay inside, it’s cold out these days,” he offers. Sirius snorts, not rudely but with the piquant sharpness of self-deprecation.

“You’ve known me for just over a month, and I think you’re perfectly kind but it feels a bit much to demand shelter from you when I’m playing cat-and-mouse with the bastards on my street. Besides, door was locked when I circled back.” Sirius offsets the explanation with a smile, but Remus still feels a vague and ridiculous sliver of hurt between his lungs. 

“What sort of curse do they think you’ve brought in?” Remus adds two spoonfuls of sugar to his mug, steering the subject as he remembers suddenly that he doesn’t drink his coffee straight black. “There was a witch here a year back who got shunned out for owning a one-eyed crow.”

“Hell and ash, I’m sorry, but your locals are fucking barmy.”

“You think I don’t know that? Trust me, I’m just here for the pub. I’d leave if I wanted to badly enough.”

“You’re more patient than I am.” Sirius fixes him with a good-natured look that warms Remus’ insides pleasantly before he veers back into Remus’ original question; “They think I’ve dragged in some sort of hellhound. ‘Garmr,’ one of those end-of-days bastards from the northern myths.”

Remus’ stomach drops and he tries not to choke on his coffee, succeeding only within an inch of the action. His throat burns with the botched swallow and he stares at his plate for a moment.  _ That’s _ why Avery had flashed the rune at Sirius last night, but what the fuck did Remus’ condition have to do with Sirius? Had one of the villagers seen Remus in the forest during the last moon and assumed Sirius had brought the wolf with him as the newest arrival to town? Fuck. Fucking shit. He needs to be more careful with his transformation. 

“You superstitious about it as well?” Sirius asks him carefully, watching Remus sideways as he collects himself. Remus shakes his head and sniffs to clear the slight watering in his eyes from nearly coughing into his mug. 

“Nah. I’ve heard some of them mutter about it though, didn’t know you were the one behind that.” Remus knows he’s probably doing a poor job of covering his tracks—he’s been an awful liar his entire life, only good at skirting truth and even then he tends to fidget when he does—but if Sirius catches wind of that he doesn’t let on. 

“The one and only, I’ll sign an autograph for you.” He spreads his arms with natural showmanship and Remus is relieved when he has to laugh, tension ebbing away from him ever so slightly.

—

The two men eat and sip their coffee in relative silence for a short while until Remus fixes Sirius with another thought; “Why do you put up with it?”

Sirius pushes half an egg yolk across his plate with a bread crust before popping it into his mouth, answering around the bite, “Up with what?”

“The beatings, the not-going-home, the antagonistic fuckery.” Remus’ face is neutral as he asks, and Sirius’s insides clench pleasantly to find he likes how natural filthy language sounds in the barkeep’s voice. Nevermind the way he had rankled when Sirius explained about the hound business—he supposes everyone is this town is just marginally batty from all the copious amounts of Nothing to do. Sirius sizes him up from across the table for a moment when Remus looks down into his coffee cup; of course he does, he’s an animal after all. Perhaps Remus, batty or not, has a bit of a wild streak in him as well. The thought does a minor chaos of wonderful things to Sirius’ insides. 

“I don’t just put up with it, I fight back sometimes.” Sirius shrugs as he speaks, running the end of one sausage through more of the yolk. It makes truly one of the most delicious things he’s eaten in almost a year if he thinks back far enough, and around the bite he licks the pad of one finger to finish his thought with another twitched shrug; “But usually they just hit harder.”

“Haven’t you a wand?” Remus’ eyebrows furrow and Sirius decides he likes the way the expression sits on the slight upward curve of the man’s nose bridge. 

“Of course I do, but not any desire to see myself into the Ministry for turning one of those fucks inside-out with it,” Sirius says. 

“Fair enough,” Remus hums into his mug. He looks thoughtful for a moment before flicking his eyes back up to Sirius. “Do you want a drink?”

Sirius arches an eyebrow. “Before tea?”

“Do you want it  _ in  _ the tea?”

Sirius laughs openly at that, an honest laugh, one that makes him toss his head back slightly with the surprising starkness in Remus’ proposal. “Cheers, hot toddies for the both of us then.”

And so Remus sets the drink to brew, Earl Grey with heavy pours of firewhiskey, well-measured and warming Sirius down to his fingertips when he wraps them around the sturdy hand-thrown mug that floats over from the unmanned bar. It’s pure nectar with the first sip, follow-up to the ambrosia of the breakfast before it, and Sirius feels taken care of for the first time in a very long time. Not that he  _ needs _ taking care of in the first place, but it feels...nice.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Sirius draws the battered metal case of hand rolls from inner breast pocket but doesn’t open it while he waits for Remus’ answer. The barkeep shakes his head through a shallow sip on his tea. 

“No, just don’t ash on the floor.”

“People do that here?” Sirius says, incredulous, through the corner of his mouth, the cigarette perched between his lips while he sets to light it with a flick of sparks from his thumb. 

“It’s a pub. People do everything short of spit on the floor, and even then you’d be surprised.” Remus thinks for a moment before smirking to himself. “Or maybe not. You’ve met most of them.” 

Sirius feels compelled to manifest the alluring quirk of Remus’ lips more completely, so he snorts with good-natured derision. “And they think  _ I’m _ the one with an animal problem? Fucking degenerates.”

Remus takes his own turn at that to laugh—his lips part unevenly across his top teeth to match the asymmetrical pull of his smile while his nose scrunches up ever so slightly in a schoolboyish portrait of mischief. Sirius is caught so off-guard by the loveliness that he forgets to draw on his cigarette to catch the light, and it fizzles before he can recover it. More than slightly flustered but hoping for subtlety, Sirius quickly flicks it to flame again and drags deeply to start its smolder.

He certainly wasn’t expecting this after a night of sleeping against empty shipping crates in an alleyway— _ Remus’ _ alleyway. But he isn’t complaining.

—

Watching Sirius smoke is, Remus quickly decides, offensively intoxicating. 

As a boy, he had gotten high several times with spliffs he shared with Leo in the loft of his parents’ barn. Remus had never been very good at smoking, always bungling the inhale and coughing or not quite holding it in for long enough. He supposes now, watching Sirius through careful periphery as the man makes his way through the tightly-rolled cigarette held delicately between thumb and forefinger, that exploring his own sexuality with the foreplay of clumsy puff-and-pass has probably hardwired some sort of accidental response to it into Remus’ system.

He isn’t complaining. 

The two men spiral on past one o’clock, straight through two, and right up to almost three with the sort of conversation for which Remus hadn’t realized he was starving. It’s shockingly natural, easy, rarely uncomfortable, and even then Sirius seems to know somehow when not to press at old wounds or sore subjects without even asking. Remus appreciates it more than he knew he could. Through it all, Remus finds himself hopelessly taken by countless little pieces of Sirius: the quicksilver brightness in his eyes, the canine tooth that twitches into view under the shape of his lips when he draws out his brighter vowels in words like  _ Really  _ or _ Anything _ , that cut still healing at the corner of his mouth that looks like it’s asking to be kissed away, licked smooth— _ Fuck me walking, _ it’s been such a ridiculously long time since Remus has touched someone beyond a handshake. He’s so devastatingly attracted to Sirius it almost hurts, but he does his best not to show it. 

He hopes, madly, that’s enough.

By the bottom of each of their third hot toddy and the crumbs of a small biscuit plate brought out around hour two, Remus has caught several glimpses of why Sirius is here, why he’s roughed and living in Dour and always seems like he’s in some sort predicament when he could live anywhere else. “I’ve a temper like flint to fucking tinder,” Sirius had said with a particularly voracious bite into a scone. “And I’m not worth much beyond what I spend here, you know. I left a lot undone at home and don’t plan on going back.”

Remus lets their talk ebb and flow as it chooses to, finally telling Sirius just as well about being blind to the city lifestyle as Sirius feels about the countryside. “You get used to it after a while,” Remus explains, stirring absently at his drink after a sip that was far more whiskey than tea, “grass and trees and all that nonsense.”

“Oh, I have. I like the trees better than almost all the people. But I still like this town more than London, believe it or not. Beatings included.” Sirius’ eyebrows twitch up once with light exasperation, and Remus resists the urge to lean across the table and stroke one of the well-groomed arches with a tender thumb. 

“You can’t honestly mean that,” Remus says doubtfully, settling for just staring at the brow from the safe table-length distance.

“I do, at the end of the day I like it here. People don’t know my last name.”

“How would your name be an issue?”

“Can you keep a secret?” The way Sirius’ expression sharpens ever so slightly with the intensity of revealing more about himself, held just out of reach like a cat’s prize, should feel slightly humiliating to Remus, but only goes straight to the warmth coiling in Remus’ guts.  _ Christ alive,  _ it really has been too long if he can feel his arousal spark like that with just a  _ look. _

“Better than you know,” Remus replies automatically. Instinctively he leans just a bit nearer across the table, inhaling lightly and taken off-guard with the scent of Sirius’ slow exhale from his latest cigarette. The smell is accidental aphrodisia that goes straight to his core, and suddenly Remus is relieved there’s a heavy-top table between them to hide the way Remus can feel his trousers tightening slightly, to prevent Remus from lunging in further to seal his mouth over the other man’s in a violent burst of hunger and—

“It’s Black.”

“Sorry?” Remus swallows through a dry mouth, hoping his voice didn’t just emerge as hoarse as it felt. He blinks to refocus and doesn’t catch anything besides flat frankness in Sirius’ gaze, so he shifts slightly in his seat and does his best to drag himself back to earth. 

“My last name is Black,” Sirius repeats, gentle, smooth, averting his eyes to turn slightly to the side with a movement that’s almost demure, staring at the calm snap of the hearth for a moment as he takes another long drag of smoke. Remus gives him a second of silence writ inwardly with his own selfishness as he commits the sight if Sirius’ profile to his deepest layer of memory. 

“As in, Ministry politicking and nepotism?” Remus offers gently, recalling scraps of the Prophet he skims whenever he remembers to read the paper—the past six years filled with an increase of the name in more and more dire headlines: _ORION BLACK NAMED HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL MAGICAL COOPERATION; ALPHARD BLACK, ARBITER OF THE BLACK FAMILY TREASURY, FOUND DEAD IN ARLES, FRANCE; BRITISH AND AMERICAN MINISTRY COALITIONS AT ODDS IN HEATED DEPARTMENT DEBATE LED BY ORION AND CYGNUS BLACK; TITLE HEIR PRESUMPTIVE OF LONDON’S MINISTRY DYNASTY REASSIGNED TO YOUNGEST SON REGULUS ARCTURUS._ It’s a family steeped in blood money and back dealings and yes, they’re on top of the world in London, but their pillar is made of salt itself—stacked ever higher and more precarious by the day through reckless ambition and unhinged wielding of power. Remus flounders for a moment to find the next thing to say that isn’t related to familial implosion, but Sirius speaks again with a wry smile before Remus can dig himself into a conversational hole.

“One in the same.” He smiles weakly, ashing out the last if his cigarette in the ashtray peppered with two other stubs of his. “You mean I don’t constantly emanate an air of positively vile tendencies anymore? Good to hear I’m improving.”

Remus chuckles with a combination of relief and Sirius’ good humor and genuine enjoyment, and he feels warm beyond the heat from the fireside and the charms and the old-as-bones spells writ into the eaves that keep the pub comfortable even as dead autumn crawls into winter; warm beneath his skin and into his very center as though keeping company with Sirius has bored into him and excavated the precious sense of inhibition he’s so sorely lost sight of over the years. Part of him still wants to play his hand very close to the chest. Another part of him, the director of last night’s wanton fantasies of Sirius taking him, roughly, over and over again, wants to throw those fucking cards into the fire and shag on the table. It’s a very strange line to walk.

The whiskey bottle floats over then of its own volition and pours itself plain into a pair of stout glasses. Remus glances at his watch, feels flexion in his heart when it shows an hour until opening. He doesn’t want Sirius to leave, but he doesn’t know how to make that obvious without asking like an idiot. Remus settles for drowning that indecision in the drink waiting before him—clinks his glass with Sirius, downs it smoothly, hopes to the heavens he won’t feel as drunk as he should be when he needs to open his doors for the day soon. 

Sirius fixes him with a look, leaning on his elbows, his head tipped slightly to the side with a strand of hair errant and escaped from a tuck behind his ear. Remus clenches his fingers to keep from fixing it. “You don’t sound like you’re from his town either, Remus,” hummed with something like amused challenge and damn it all, his name sounds comfortable and poetic on Sirius’ tongue. “None of the locals speak like you do.”

“Don’t they now?” Remus tries for casual but lands harder on a purr—shit.  _ Fucking whiskey.  _ Well, at least he tried. 

“There it is,  _ ‘Doont theey naue.’ _ Your vowels are all spheres, it’s amazing. Where’d you get that?” Sirius leans his chin on his hand in a movement that Remus is quickly learning is one of his defaults. 

“There’s a town across the sea.” Remus traces the lip of his emptied glass with one finger, as if he could make it sing were it crystal instead of glass. “A little place, sort of like this but with scads more sun. I was born there, grew up, and then wanted to leave.” He remembers with a distant sort of smile how much he had loved his parents’ sprawling backyard, the only place he could run in the dark to see out his changes for years on end. But he avoids breaching anything about the curse, the bite he’s had since boyhood;  _ Wanted to leave since after they all found out they threatened me gone just as well.  _ It hurts, vaguely, to think about it, but he forces a tight smile across the table at Sirius. Sirius’ eyes spark with something that goes by too quickly to catch, but he returns it all the same. 

Again Remus feels a beat of that warmth in his pulse—unknown, un-searched for, unequivocally new for Remus’ days in this seaside hovel. Again he draws it near and close like another secret, meant to be kept and never revealed.

———

Skittering along side streets again, Sirius is recklessly four-legged and wild for release. Padfoot, his name for the creature born into his blood from his foray in forbidden transfiguration, feels more necessary than ever after a long month of hiding—sneaking, pining, sulking, whatever one thinks best to call the maddening lump in his lungs whenever he enters The Thirsty Dog and sees Remus simply  _ existing _ . It’s been nearly four weeks since their afternoon together and Sirius is too much of a coward to ask the barkeep for another one. Getting himself off hardly helps anymore. All he could think to do this evening was throw himself into the dog and forget how to feel his more human pieces for one night. 

Sirius hates the trouble if trying to exist in secret, but for all the racking for release his insides have been doing lately this is freedom. This is glorious, unfettered freedom. He’s managed to avoid Rosier and Avery for several days at a time, feeling made of wind itself—he’s turning north now, toward the great stone bridge that he’s never seen anyone use besides the man who delivers the paper, crossing it now with wide gallops in the uneven four-beat of his paws, rocketing into the forest as he feels the ground shift to dirt and decomposition underfoot. He free, he’s  _ free, _ Sirius lets his tongue loll out as he pants and barrels on into the trees—

—

—half-conscious beside the wolf’s mind, Remus charges through the forest at full tilt. The moon bathes everything in pale silver, reflecting like mirrored glass that throws gnarled shadows around as pell-mell, dancing companions to Remus’ gait while he bounds between the trees. Beneath the fur and bone he can feel his own preoccupations melt away, freed from the twisting in his heart whenever he sees Sirius lately and can’t bring himself dredge up the bravery to pick him up.  _ Come upstairs,  _ it should be so easy to say;  _ We both need this, don’t you feel it too? _

But the wolf in him doesn’t need a fuck, it needs to run until it exhausts itself enough to sleep under Remus’ pulse for another month—always staving off the inevitability of transforming again, that uncomfortable push of teeth and snout and back-bent limbs that could never be called agony but always make him feel slightly less of a man, less of—

The sound of a distant branch cracking skids Remus to a stop. He pricks his ears, tunes his nose, smells someone, something, some other creature in this dessicated husk of a forest besides him. A bright pang of territorialism flares through him and before he recognizes it, Remus is off like a shot toward the sound. Could be anything, could be danger, but he meets conflict head-on as the wolf instead of skirting his way around it as a man, a-snarl and sprinting to find—

—

—there, across from him as he bursts out of the pines into a small clearing, Sirius stops under the golden blade of a wolf’s stare. The corner of conscious thought left awake in him flails for purchase;  _ No wolves in these parts, what the fuck?  _ Is  _ this  _ the object of the town’s superstition? Is this the hound, Garmr, prowling in the woods just waiting for the right time to come down and drag the sea and salt and salience of catastrophe into the town along with it?

It’s massive, at least one-and-a-half times the side of Padfoot. Eyes a-glow and teeth bared but not lunging at Sirius—watching. Squaring him up, staring him down as though measuring the other beast across from him like a worthy opponent on a dueling pitch. Against all sense, tail a-wag to court chaos like a familiar bedfellow, Sirius barks. 

_ Something to run with, something to chase, _ Sirius slaps the ground with his front paws and lowers himself to wait in expectant come-and-play with his ears up straight. The wolf’s eyes flash before it throws its head back and howls, up to the moon with a piercing bay, and Sirius feels his instincts vibrate to life in his core as he responds—scratchy-voiced mutt crying up to the sky, replying in the unspoken chorus for the giddiness of having a companion in this forest. The wolf looks back at him with its tail up, hackles down, and Sirius begins his chase.

—

Remus would never call himself particularly burdened by his transformations. The romance of a tortured beast never fit him well and tasted strange the scant few times he tried wearing it, and so he’s long compartmentalized the inconvenience of his monthly shifts into something feeling far more like exasperation—You Again? Alright, Out To The Woods We Go. But since Albus passed and there’s been one less person alive who knows Remus’ secret, the months have felt lonelier.  _ Life  _ has felt lonelier.

This moment, this running with another animal, feels good. Purposeful. 

Underbrush pushes at him with an encouraging rush as Remus crashes through the forest with the black dog on his heels. Panting heavily, pace at a bolt gallop, flying through the trees as he always does on his own but now there’s another. Another he’s never seen before in all his time burying himself deeper and deeper into the press of these trees, another creature with whom to pretend the ire of the village doesn’t exist for just one night as he runs the anxiety out of his blood under the watchful eye of the moon. 

Remus lets the dog tail him and catch him and continue to tail him again, in and around each other and through all the whorled bends of the woods. They nip at one another—rolling and mouthing, trading the yips and whines of playful submission between themselves with the sharp edge of teeth and claw, pawing, baying with the frayed tones of encouragement and throwing all their canine caution to the wind. Remus flops into huffing repose beside the dog when he tires and leaps up for more when he catches his wind, and they continue like massive, tangle-furred puppies for several hours with such fervor that Remus forgets to watch for sunrise. 

The return to his body takes him by surprise when the grey shafts of daylight begin seeping across the forest floor. Remus feels it first in his chest, like a building wave of prickling tingles that spreads from the core of his heart out into his bloodstream—a strange cooling of his entire internal system, as though the lycanthropy freezes over in a great body-wide frost once dawn begins to chip its way in. From there it works inward, swallowing his forelegs and then his tail, warping his face back to his own and pulling the fur back and away from his skin to leave his freckles and scars and whatever fresh scrapes are there from the woods. He stumbles to his knees, naked and thrashed with the forest’s fingernails but exhausted in the best of ways; takes a moment to rest where he lands on his back, still heaving breath, and stare at his slightly-trembling hands for a moment as he returns to himself. It’s the first time in a long time he hasn’t been asleep through the transformation, and reeling still from the walls of adrenaline makes the incoming daylight feel like unexpected Eden rising past the horizon—too-bright, too-white, too-fresh. 

Centered after several minutes, Remus looks to his side and smiles to see the black dog still standing alert beside him. It looks vaguely curious, still panting but watching him closely, something brilliant in its sharp grey eyes that dogs always have alive behind their stares. Remus has ever been fond of dogs and clicks his tongue warmly at the creature, and he reaches out to scratch behind its ears with sleepy cheerfulness before he sets to the heavy task of rising to his feet and returning to the hollow where he left his clothing. 

To Remus’ amusement the dog trails alongside him the whole way back, trotting along the packed ground and stepping across some of the less-solid inclines of moss and greenery with grace that seems incongruous to the dog’s near-waist-tall height. “Where’s your collar then?” Remus breaks the stillness of the air with a voice shorn raw with grateful fatigue. “You a stray?”

The dog whines once as though it understands him, and Remus can’t hold in a spontaneous grin. Perhaps he’s made a new monthly friend.

He finds the tree stump for this clothes and dresses in the quarter-dark, his weeds thankfully far less dampened than last month. Remus feels the chill of early morning set onto him in earnest before he pulls on his overcoat, draws his wand out from the left sleeve to set a handful of warming charms into his pockets in response to the shiver that racks him, runs a hand through his hair to clear a twig that’s decided to hitch a ride. Finally, he looks down at the dog who fixes him with a gaze that one could almost call expectant. 

“I think if I took you back with me the townsfolk would set fire to the pub.” He kneels to eye level with the dog and scratches behind its pointed ears again, cooing a bit and digging it when it tilts its head to increase the pressure and direction of Remus’ hand. “If you live up here though I can see you again next month?”

At that the dog licks Remus’ face with such  _ Alright Then _ timing that Remus has to laugh as he pats the dog again in farewell. “Cheers then, I’ll see you in a couple weeks. Keep the place clean for me, yeah?”

Back then he goes, hands deep in warmed pockets and head still a-swim with vaguely wolfish thoughts of trees and dirt, back to the village to close his monthly pilgrimage toward and away from the call of the moon like the tide she pulls to the west.

—

Sirius waits another ten minutes after the ghosts of Remus’ footfalls have faded into the distance before he even thinks of transforming back. Returned to two legs he sits heavily on the ground, fiddling nervously at bunches of pine needles between his knees. He hadn’t expected to find any other creature in these silent, looming woods, much less another human,  _ much _ less another human who also moonlights as an Animag—

_ Oh fuck. _

Sirius whips around to face the sky and his stomach twists with something that should be fear but feels much closer to exhilaration.  _ Moonlight, moon, wolf, holy bloody fucking shit, the barkeep is a werewolf.  _ Remus is a werewolf, probably has been this entire time, and Sirius is the one the town thinks has been haunting their streets.  _ Garmr is down from the forest? Garmr is serving you your fucking pints! _

Sirius moves to stand but he has to laugh instead, a breathless and incredulous thing as he leans forward with his hands on his thighs. No bloody wonder he’s felt so drawn to the man—in addition to being almost offensively attractive, Remus has got just as deep and similar of a secret as Sirius. He’s always thought fate was a load of shit, still does—he’ll die when he dies, good and ready—but perhaps won’t take the time to roll his eyes  _ quite _ so deeply anymore at mentions of Meant To Be.

Sirius straightens his jacket and ties his hair up, ridding it of more than a few small pinecones, brushes off the seat of his trousers and heads back toward the river bridge back to town. The whole way his mind is a hurricane of replaying interactions from the afternoon they spent together; could he have read Remus’ condition from there? Could Remus have read _his_ condition from there? He comes to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter just as he comes to the top of his stoop to murmur the lock open, never bothering with keys, much less handy than personalized wards atop the _Alohamora_ he breaks and resets behind him with a whisper. It’s that glass-surface hour over the town, precipitously placid as the sun rises to keep the night-dwellers in wherever they’ve found themselves but not quite morning enough yet for the few early risers to leave their homes. For at least another half hour, the town is still. Sirius can forget he’s surrounded by sour spirits and angry folk magic for just a little longer. It’s this time of day he likes best.

Up the stairs to his apartment with the ever-so-slight slant to its floors, daylight sneaks in through his featherweight curtains and paints the wall opposite the window with pale greeting. The tiling in the bath echoes emptily when Sirius flicks its light on, not fluorescent but feeling very sharp to the place behind his eyes as he peels off his clothes. He bends with a wince to open the hot water tap and watches for a blank moment as it sputters mightily in its rush into the tub.

The grime of running as Padfoot that he always washes off feels amplified by this new foray into the forest. He twists in the mirror with a tired stare to catalogue his skin, unbroken but scratched in several spots—whether by trees or teeth he can’t divine from most of them. His back and legs are sketched with the red threads of his run, his shoulders painted in three places with patterns scraped vaguely in the tracks the wolf’s playful mouthing. They’re all too shallow to scar so he looks at them closely, memorizes their placement like passport stamps, and thinks idly of how many times Remus must have made his transformation throughout his life to amass the signatures of the earth on his own skin. Sirius can’t know for how long the other man has been cursed, but he can certainly guess more than a few years with the volume of scrawling silvered marks that wind across his body.

Thinking of Remus’ nakedness spikes into his gut with ferocious intensity. Nevermind that it had been set against the least-alluring background of exhaustion and decaying trees. The image projecting onto the inside of Sirius’ skull shows Remus pale gold, peppered with soft-looking paths of that cinnamon-brown hair, his collar and hip bones like knotted brass and muscles moving in long, silken pulls through his limbs, a deity of morning amid all the grey; tired ivy eyes alight with something that Sirius’ memory mixes headily with the feeling of the wolf rolling him, pinning him, growling down at him benignly,  _ Does that power live in his body as a man? _

Sirius bites his tongue and tries not to address the feeling of his blood moving southward as he steps into the basin of his tub. The cake of soap that might be scented lavender if one really reaches has a pleasant grit to it that Sirius focuses on as it moves across his skin, tries not to dredge up the feeling of the wolf licking idly at Padfoot’s hackles in a moment of repose, grinds his back teeth when the memory contorts itself into the thought of Remus dragging his tongue over Sirius’ neck and down—

“Stop.” Sirius’ voice is raw from barking and whining and baying throughout the night, and it echoes along with the muddled splishing of bathwater as he admonishes himself. Ridiculous, honestly, to dream up a vision of Remus in a situation that could never happen. Something as far-fetched as having him here in the bath to slough the forest off of his skin as well, let Sirius wash him clean and sluice water down the columns of his body, willing, bending back to let him touch and “Stop it, Sirius.”

He glowers down at his eddying reflection in the water. Indulgence in this instance could be disastrous. He’s only known Remus for two months, and he isn’t about to bungle it by misplacing his desire.

_ But would it really be misplaced? _

Frowning, he continues to wash. His mind and his veins have different ideas and Sirius feels himself losing the battle with very gradual slips of resolution, but he focuses on scouring the planes of his limbs with clinical accuracy.

The dirt and dried-on sweat are gone soon enough, so Sirius charms the water clean and hot again and lets himself soak for a bit longer. He submerges up to his ears and closes his eyes, intent on turning off his mind for a least a moment, but all he can think of then is the underwater leviathan beat of his pulse. Especially the feeling of where and how deeply that pulse is going. He waits as long as he can bear it before recklessness intercedes and, to his credit, it’s somewhere around the vicinity of five entire minutes. 

Sirius slides a hand down his water-slick skin to find himself more than half-hard. His touch is deft and practiced and he tells himself it only feels this good because he’s still swooning from the high of his run; he only lets his eyes flutter shut and makes that softly desperate sound because he’s really quite tired; his mind is only racing and latching onto thoughts of Remus because Padfoot’s headspace is taking its sweet time departing—

Oh, who the fuck is he kidding anymore.

Sirius is caught, fast and fatally, like a rabbit in Remus’ teeth. 

And he isn’t frightened by the threat of it at all. 

_ If we’re both beasts, then so be it.  _ Sirius’ inner voice tolls in his’ mind like the hallowed crashing of bells when he begins to gasp around the building crest of pleasure, his body alight with flaring arousal as his voiced encouragement to himself and his whirling fantasies of greenery and earth and ruby-wet mouths twines into the gentle disturbance of the bath water to carry him aloft with the rising autumn sun.

———

Remus lists through the afternoon and early evening, unmoored and adrift in his thoughts. He’s glad the pub is charmed thickly enough to nearly run itself, and he’s even glad for the way the patrons hardly give him the time of day once they’ve got their drinks. He’s been marginally useless since waking up with tangled thoughts of last night’s moon.

Where could the dog even have come from? Remus thinks hard but can be sure within an inch of his life that nobody in town owns a dog like that— _ any _ sort of dog—for the virility of superstition around the hound who brings the world’s end on its heels. It could be a stray living in the woods or even a native wolf, but that would either mean that Remus has attracted the attention of a dog who used to belong to somebody  _ in _ the woods or he’s encroached on territory already belonging to a pack. Both options could mean blood in the near future.  _ His _ blood. Remus shakes his head to scatter the directionless brooding and, pouring a fresh round of ale for the cluster of wizards by the fireplace, is about to start redirecting his thoughts to reluctant daydreams of Sirius when the man himself glides through the door like he’d been wished into presence. 

The exhaustion melts away from Remus’ shoulders and he fastidiously watches Sirius fold himself onto a barstool through his periphery. It’s reaching and ridiculous to feel so immediately awoken by the other man’s arrival—Remus tries twice not to look up at him, fails with a raking drag of his eyes to devour a glance of Sirius from top to tail when he has to deliver the full glasses to the table. He meets Sirius’ stare with the last  _ thunk _ of pint to table and receives a velveteen smile from the man, only glad he didn’t spill the ale everywhere as he returns to his place behind the bar.

“Evening.” Remus attempts Brisk and only really gets halfway through Breathless with his greeting, but at least he doesn’t wince at the shortcoming. Sirius mocks a suave salute in response and Remus notices his black eye has healed completely, his expression is fresh with clarity, his lip is still marked by the healed split; perhaps it will scar, perhaps Remus will feel the ridge of it when he kisses Sirius with all the built-up hunger of the last two months and— _ Stop it. You have no guarantee he wants it, quit making yourself miserable. _

—

Sirius doesn’t miss the way Remus lights up when he pushes through the door, and he tries not to stare as the barkeep carefully delivers a round of pints to the hearthside table. That woolen grace of his, the accidental sort that screams at Sirius’ instincts to rush over and shove the other patrons aside, kiss the air out of Remus, splay him out on his back across the table like a feast, does maddening things to Sirius’ guts as he forces himself to sit still at the bar and wait for Remus to come back around. 

“Evening,” Remus hums, lovely and airy thing his voice is at the moment, and Sirius can’t trust himself to say anything for a terrifying second so settles for a perfectly disastrous tip of his fingers to his temple.  _ Fucking hell, pull yourself together, Sirius. _

There’s a honeyed tinge in Remus’ glance, just for a moment, when Sirius catches his eyes again—his lungs flare through with the blessed fire of possession and Sirius forgets for a moment how to draw air. The wolf flashes in that golden vein dancing in the shallows of Remus’ irises to draw up Sirius’ fresh recollection of the creature’s curious stare. Its howl thrums at the hollow of Sirius’ throat, the feeling of its teeth mouthing harmlessly at Sirius’ skin wreaking havoc there as well.  _ Shut it down, don’t get hard at the fucking pub. _

“Cheers, how have you been then?” If he keeps to the side streets of vapid pleasantries, perhaps he won’t want to set himself on fire too badly by the end of the night.

Remus rucks his beige sleeves up to his elbows and pours Sirius a brandy as he sighs, low and slowly. “Tired,” he says through it. “Insomnia is one of my least favorite genetic predispositions.”

_ If that’s insomnia I’d give my wand to see you sleepwalking. _ Sirius quiets the internal shout at the pit of his heart with an even sip from the glass he accepts from Remus before he tips it at the barkeep with a smirk. “My mother is mine, but we can open that can of worms after a few more drinks.” Remus awards him the victory of a laugh, the honest sort that cuts through his exhaustion and truly lights up his face. Sirius bites his bottom lip with subtle resistance and folds the sight deep into his memory.

He finds it impossible not to catalogue every move Remus makes now, even more so than before with the knowledge of the wolf lying dormant in his body. He moves through his tasks like a pack leader—watching over his domain of the pub with encompassing flicks of his eyes, setting and cleaning and filling used glasses with sure and strong hands, only breaking the imagery every now and again with a yawn that he covers more often than not but sometimes escapes by surprise to show his teeth and his tongue if Sirius glances up at the right moment. Sirius runs an unconscious hand across his neck to remember the pressure of the wolf’s teeth there, harmless but powerful, and he finds that he’s hungry for that sense of give and take again.  _ Less than twenty-four hours out and you’re already loopy for more. You’re a disaster. _

Sirius ignores his inner critic and keeps as surreptitious as a stare on Remus as he can without feel like an eel, stealing an extra dose of the sight to drink in the stretch of the barkeep’s broad shoulders when he turns to the liquor shelves to search at its higher reaches for some foreign tincture. Remus turns back to the lowball glasses to pour it, the bottle dark and tall and slim; Sirius’ chest constricts sweetly to see Remus tuck the corner of his bottom lip under one eyetooth in concentration as he prepares a cocktail for another patron sitting further down the bar, but Sirius doesn’t see who it is—everyone else feels very faceless indeed to Sirius’ loss of perception for anyone in the pub that isn’t Remus. Remus looks up once he slides the glass over to its drinker, quickly, like he’s been pulled by instinct, and Sirius relishes the marked flush that he watches creep across the golden plinth of his neck when he sees Sirius’ eyes fixed carefully on his mouth.

_ I’ll have you, _ Sirius decides immediately, the thought rising up from the most basal layer of his wants and needs as he takes his sweet time moving his stare up to lock on Remus’ own and hold it in a striking invisible spark that feels through and through like canine challenge.  _ I’ll have you tonight, over and over again. Just say the word. _

—

The incoming frost has kept most of the regulars inside for the bite of the air. Remus is glad for the premature emptying-out of the pub, because despite the cold beyond his windows he feels like his insides are on fire for the way Sirius has been watching him all night. 

Their conversation has been light, mostly about weather and food and Sirius’ desires for a new book to read, but the purpose behind those granite-fierce eyes of his are driving Remus up the wall with rioting tension that’s liable to make Remus out and cry  _ Just vault over the bartop and fuck me already! _

But he can’t  _ do _ that. Yet.

There’s still one regular left tucked into his back corner booth with a half-full pint before him. Mad Eye, the old war-weary local with a charmed eyepatch and a penchant for telling the same stories to anyone in his vicinity about the way the Aurors used to have “Real bloody fucking backbone” in the days of flagrant conflict, doesn’t show any sign of clearing out. Remus is usually patient with him but the combination of having just weathered a moon atop his clamoring need to figure out what Sirius’ hands finally like on his skin have worn his fuse down to its end. 

“Moody,” calling out to the old man like a frayed lifeline in the bay beyond with a hint of anxiousness sewn into it, “closing up in a bit. You’ll have to take the drink elsewhere.”

“An’t even midnight, Lupin, fuck off.”

Remus clenches his teeth for a moment to keep from shouting in uncharacteristic frustration. Sirius has been stealing looks at him all night like he’s some sort of plated delicacy, and it’s destroyed Remus’ usual placidity. “Can’t fuck off out of my own pub,” he settles for replying. “Sorry, Moody, time to go.” He wrings his hands around the cloth he’s holding, sketching the feeling of strangling something to shunt all his nervous energy.  _ Come on, you leathern bastard, get out. _

Moody sits up straighter and squints at the bar, frowning to see Sirius still perched there. “But  _ he _ gets to stay?” His voice is acidic when he points widely at Sirius and it makes Remus’ blood simmer.

“I’m through drinking, mate. Lost a bet to him, have to help mop up after you’re off.” Sirius’ interjection is smooth, with all the right shades of downtrodden embarrassment tied up around his words. Remus gives him a subtle look he hopes is thankful—he can hardly tell what his own feelings are doing at the moment. 

Moody mutters something graveled and blackened to himself before he pushes his way out of his seat, trundling over to the bar with a deeply-carved frown to set his unfinished glass on the bar with an unceremonious drop. “Suppose not bein’ in t’ same building as you’s reason enough to go,” he spits at Sirius. He slaps a handful of knuts down in front of Remus and sneers. “Good fucking night, Lupin.”

Tension sits heavily on Remus’ shoulders as he watches Mad Eye limp his way out, the door thudding shut with a wooden creak behind him. “Ta,” Remus growls at the empty space, seething broadly at the way everyone treats Sirius like some sort of pestilence. If they took the time to fucking  _ talk _ to him instead of assuming the worst, believing he’s going to bring down the sky all because he comes from a different part of the same bloody island they all—

“Lupin, is it?”

Remus blinks out of his roiling mind and looks up to see that he’s gripping the lip of bar in tight hands while Sirius watches him with an intrigued and careful look. “Sorry?”

“Your surname. It’s unique.”

“I—yeah. My father’s side is...old magic.” Remus drags his fingers through his hair and does more harm than good to the general order of his curls. He should say something. Now that the pub is empty he should absolutely say something, invite Sirius upstairs, it would be easy,  _ should  _ be easy, to do this small but momentous thing for himself for once—let himself feel even the smallest flicker of pleasure right now, amidst all the fog and frustration and bland effort of just existing over the last two years—

But Sirius speaks before Remus can siphon up his confidence.

—

“I’ve a request.”

Sirius’ voice is more of a murmur than he means it to be, but it still pulls Remus out of what looks like a stormcloud of deep thought; he pauses when Remus’ jaw tightens around the soft shape of a frown, but he knows if he quits talking altogether he’ll lose the fuel of his courage for what he wants to— _ needs _ to ask. He darts his tongue across his lips and looks down at his empty glass. “I...know I’m a bit of a ways away and it’s more than slightly frigid, but would you care to take a walk back to mine?”

Holding his breath, Sirius finds the bravery to lift his eyes again just in time to see another perfect blush paint its way along Remus’ skin. It’s glory on high. Magic should be spun from that shade of red, spells should be scrawled on Remus’ skin to be cast with lips and fingertips—Sirius wants to see him bare again like he was in the woods, prone and sated with heavy-lidded eyes and an easy smile. He realizes he’s dug the heel of one hand into his thigh with the other gripping his glass as he waits for Remus’ answer, and Sirius hopes his expression doesn’t betray too much desperation in one go. 

When Remus finally answers, after no longer than a handful of seconds that feels augmented into something closer to eons, it’s after a swallow and brief nod on a voice that’s gone pale but still sure of itself. “Cheers, yeah. Let me just close up a bit. Take—here, have another while I set to.”

He pours a tall shot and slides it over to Sirius before letting slip a grin that looks as though it’s fought its way to the surface across the throughways of surprise and relief. Staggered in the most delectable way, Sirius lets his fingers brush against Remus’ as he takes the drink. The warmth he finds, even there in the briefest touch, takes root in him with a jagged flash, an invasive climbing ivy he would never dare cut down from his own internal trellis. Remus’ eyes widen slightly as though he has a litany of things to say, opens his mouth once, closes it again, mutters “Right,” and whirls off into the kitchen to bang away at a hectic stream of straightening up. Sirius shifts in his seat and lets out a low, tremulous breath. If that had been one touch, practically accidental, he can hardly imagine what it will feel like on purpose.

Sirius sips at the drink, well and sharp and a drop in the bucket of his heavyweight tolerance, as Remus spells the kitchen to clean itself and bustles through the pub to get the chairs stacked on top of tables like the bare bones of clustered wooden carrion. Sirius bounces his leg slightly where he’s hooked it on his barstool as Remus weaves through and around the pub, and it’s only two short minutes after he takes up the mop that he returns it to its bucket with a clatter and snatches a corduroy coat from the rack at the back of the bar shelves. “Fuck the floor,” he blurts, “I’ll mop it later. Ready to go?”

Sirius bites back a chuckle at the immediacy, utterly charmed by Remus’ frantic eagerness to depart with him as the barkeep tosses the coat over his shoulders and buttons it up with quick flicks of his fingers. Sirius downs the last drop of his drink to stand, his knees creaking slightly, and gestures to the door. “After you.”

The night opens to them like a sigh on the other side of the entryway. Sirius takes a slow, stilling breath to himself as he listens to the clinkering of Remus’ keys shutting up shop behind him, ending with a tap of his wand to the handle to set it alight with a frosty green locking ward. The gibbous moon shines down on the stretch of street leading back to Dour, milk-silver to leak away over the stretch of the coming month, and Sirius steels himself readily for the incoming slaking of his desire.

—

Footsteps ringing dully on the time-worn cobblestones and brick, slippery-smooth underfoot like the shallows of the sea to the west of town, Remus tails close as Sirius brings them down the winding pathways back to his home. Remus’ mind is at once a wash of silence and a madness of noise, but either way he can’t pin down a thought for long enough to make any sense of cognizance besides  _ Walk.  _ Both men are clipping along at such a pace they don’t speak to one another, long strides carving down the lanes, oily viridescent lamplight cutting through the night’s fog to streak over their upturned collars and pluming steam breath in the cold—Sirius is pluming smoke, he’s pinched alight a cigarette. The cherry end if it bobs just ahead of his face in the dark, lighting up his slightly-determined expression that Remus watches when he glances over at the man, the bottom half of it a low orange that blooms brighter when he takes a drag and slides his gaze over to catch Remus’ own; “Want one?”

The hand roll stays expertly held between his lips while he speaks as it had last month when they shared breakfast, drink, the folly of familiarity. Remus almost tumbles over his own two feet with the thought of running his tongue across and into that mouth in the very near future, but he manages to stay upright and shakes his head. “No, thanks. Never was my habit.”

“What is then?”

“What is?”

Sirius takes another tight pull of smoke and pistons it out like a steam engine. “Your habit.”

“Running,” Remus replies automatically without thinking. Sirius hums with gentle amusement, and the comfortable baritone of its sound goes straight to Remus’ trousers. 

“Healthy.” The hint of sarcasm there makes Remus wont to give up the last word and rib dangerously at the one-sided secret of lycanthropy he had hidden under the offering. 

“You could call it that.”

His heart is in his throat with the tang of anticipation as Remus follows Sirius along the final left turn onto Dour Court. The streets narrow here to capillaries of their wider selves, buildings reaching high and narrow and slightly sagged as though their architecture is in mourning for its own past resilience. Sirius takes them down side streets, avoiding the main byways and the muted din of scattered pubs and homes glowing with interior lights or the technicolor flickers of television screens. Adrenaline and arousal run high in Remus’ veins as they reach a small dead end after several more turns; Remus looks around the shadowed basin of rowhouses and tries to inwardly guess which one belongs to Sirius, almost turns to jokingly ask him if he’s going to prepare a wreath for the holidays—a sudden gash of abnormality across the nearest door pulls his attention right as Sirius hisses a violent curse to himself. Remus raises his eyebrows and turns to see what could pull something so vile out of someone’s vocabulary.

—

_ BAD DOG. _

Garish white paint, still dripping from the “O,” stains his door like a fucking iron wall between him and promise of at least a moment of respite through another man’s body. _BAD DOG,_ as though the universe is glaring down at him, pinning him with a lance through his middle like a Death’s Head moth on paper, _BAD DOG,_ _you made this choice and now you’ll live with it;_ _BAD DOG,_ _you mutt who ran away into the fens with your tail between your legs;_ _BAD DOG, you aren’t welcome here, you will never be welcome anywhere you go—_

“Sirius.”

Sirius starts when a warm hand touches his shoulder, jolting him out of his livewire fury. Remus’ brow is furrowed to look between him and the ugly graffiti, but at least, Sirius’ train of thought flails for purchase, he isn’t running. In fact his gaze is even tender when he tips his head slightly to the side to ask, “You alright?”

“My neighbors are awful,” immediate, hissed, boiling steam from the cracked pipe of his last straw, wanting so badly not to burn Remus with it when the words scald his own tongue with surprising clarity to make their way past the thickness he feels like slag in his throat.

“Do you want to tell me about it inside?”

Sirius half expects Remus to be sneering, jeering, mocking Sirius’ inability to avoid accidental catastrophe and snubbing him for naught but a fucking superstition, but the man looks, of all things,  _ nervous. _ A careful smile like unmade bed sheets on his lips, those pretty lips; Sirius should kiss him, he should—“Yeah,” he breathes, “if you want to.”

Remus nods. “Yeah, I do.”

There is then. Sirius murmurs open his door and in they go, up the creaking stairs, into the comfortable murk of the house on Dour Court. 

—

Remus’ heart is hammering in his throat as he climbs the stairs behind Sirius to a simple and un-vandalized door on the second floor. Sirius whispers the lock open again and Remus has to smirk to himself, how absolutely metropolitan that Sirius doesn’t even use keys, who  _ is _ this man standing amid the chaff of this town like the single standing stalk of wheat left in autumn’s harvest? Remus wants to know him, completely. 

“Sorry for the, ah, unexpected greeting down there.” Sirius twitches his hand to spell on a pair of low-burning lamps, angular and twisted antique things the both of them, at either far corner of the compact little sitting room. Remus still has his hands in his coat pockets as Sirius shrugs off his leather jacket to leave himself in a worn royal blue jumper with a faded logo that looks vaguely like a quidditch team emblem.

“No worries,” Remus assures him with a dry sniff of laughter—nerves, good humor, excitement, he can’t tell where anything is coming from anymore. He’s wholly unphased by the door, he’s seen worse at the pub than that shitty attempt at public shaming. “It’s not as if I didn’t already know they’re not very keen on you.”

Sirius looks at his feet for a moment and draws breath before he stops himself and bites down on his tongue. Remus’ heart flexes with affection to see the man literally holding the tip of his tongue between his teeth, as though he doesn’t trust his words in the safety of his own flat, and Remus is so enchanted by the incongruity of Sirius’ cocksure demeanor against the way he stands now that he obeys the sharp tug in his lungs to step forward, slide his hands up to cradle Sirius’ face, and catch him in a roughly impassioned kiss. 

Remus inhales their nearness when their lips connect. Sirius is all smoke and brandy and something sharp and lovely beneath it, struck still for the barest second with surprise before he begins responding in earnest to the press of Remus’ mouth. He wraps a sturdy arm around Remus’ waist, beneath his coat and against the knit of his sweater to hold them both flush, his other hand immediately to Remus’ hair as though he’s been waiting an age and a day to sink his fingers into it. Remus melts against him and is only halfway aware of the mellifluous sound that escapes him when Sirius tugs with a gentle pull at his scalp and opens his kiss to suck softly at Remus’ bottom lip. Sirius’ teeth scrape like a whisper at the skin there and Remus shudders to let the unhinged shatter-glass edges of arousal spangle through his body. 

They kiss where they stand for several long passes of one another’s lips, deep and exploratory and hungry, writ through with all the light huffs of breath and small raw sounds of encouragement that Remus hasn’t felt or heard since before he fled the familiarity and relative ease of home. Remus slides one hand lower to Sirius’ shoulder and runs his fingers auspiciously along the collar of his jumper to trace ever so slightly at the skin beneath it—Sirius inhales sharply and makes a low hum of approval, a sweetened growl, a sound familiar to Remus’ deeper instincts but he doesn’t for the life of him know how or why. He doesn’t care. He only wants to be nearer to Sirius, feel that skin under his entire palm, feel the way Sirius might bend and twist in response to what Remus’ own body—

—

Pulling back from the kiss is the most difficult thing Sirius has ever done since voluntarily closing his access to the family vault before leaving London. He fully intends on making Remus beg with ecstasy tonight, but the flashes he keeps recalling of their run in the woods makes it hard to ignore the compaction of such a heavy secret and carry on with the mounting intensity. 

“You’re very good at that,” murmured low against Remus’ lips as Sirius eases back and tries to collect himself. He catalogues the open want in Remus’ expression, his lips kissed red and wet and his pupils wide and depthless to demand  _ More _ ; the way he looks sharply at Sirius is absolutely holy. 

“Takes two,” Remus breathes in reply. Sirius swallows around his nerves, nerves, too fucking nervous, are his hands truly shaking or is that just his pulse?

“I—” Sirius closes his eyes and sighs a low oath, knees weak, when Remus interrupts him by moving to trace a heated trail of open-mouthed kisses up the column of his neck. His fingers flex where they’re held against Remus’ body and he lets out a desperately-voiced  _ Oh  _ when Remus sucks gently on his earlobe. If Sirius doesn’t say it now he won’t get the chance—he doesn’t trust himself to be responsible enough with delicate truths when his arousal builds to burn much hotter than this, and so without an ounce of grace he draws breath and declares to Remus and the semi-dark of his flat, “I was with you in the woods last night.”

—

He stills with his teeth still at the shell of Sirius’ ear and Remus knows the sudden rigidity of his posture is obvious.  _ Oh shit, oh fuck, he’s seen, he knows, _ the old terror of another’s revelation to his curse filling him with cold dread in a slow and burning crawl. The only thing he can think to whisper is “What?” His breath flutters against Sirius’ jaw and he feels the other man shiver but hardly registers it. Sirius knows. Sirius saw him, Sirius was there—Sirius was  _ there? _

“I was with you in the woods,” Sirius repeats, still holding him, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? He hasn’t backed himself into a corner yet with his wand drawn, but what does this mean;  _ Sirius was there? _

“No you weren’t,” Remus insists, fear making him petulant, pulling back to frown at Sirius’ slightly dazed and more than slightly myopic stare shot through with need and disbelief and something foreign, something fathomless. “I didn’t see you there, no you weren’t.” At the back of his mind Remus realizes he isn’t denying that he was in the woods to begin with, but he doesn’t quite care for details like that when there’s confusion to be had.

Sirius sets his jaw and has the audacity to smile then, a very subtle one but a smile nonetheless, and Remus almost feels fury rise up in him. How dare this city-bred dandy toy with something so dire, the  _ one thing _ Remus’ inner ramparts are weak to buckling against. He’s about to pull back and give Sirius the full brunt of that particular piece of his mind, but Sirius beats him to the punch.

“Remus,” he murmurs patiently, blinks several times,  _ He’s nervous, why is he nervous, what the bloody hell does he have to be— _ “Bad. Dog.”

Remus’ thoughts fizzle like a wet match.  _ Bad Dog, he can’t mean—holy fucking ruddy shit. _

—

“That was you,” Remus gasps, his breath hitching on itself. “But you, you’re not a werewolf, you—are you an  _ Animagus?  _ That’s fucking illegal!”

Sirius doesn’t want to laugh but has to, brightly, at the tart way Remus’ shock makes his nose scrunch and his voice canter up a few semitones. “And pray tell, are you registered with the Ministry?” He asks on the tail of his laughter.

Remus’ cheeks are peppered with freckles from this close and Sirius can nearly count them beneath the sheen of exhilaration running pink across the other man’s face. Remus shakes his head but keeps the air of superiority; “Neither are you, I would assume with all your skulking.”

_ “Skulking?” _

“Why did you come out to the woods, if not to skulk?”

“I don’t know what a wolf does to your blood, but the dog clamors for his turn after long enough.” Sirius still has an arm around Remus, and he finds he quite likes it there. “I was letting him run.”

“That was the least-awful moon I’ve had in years,” Remus admits immediately on the heels of Sirius’ words. Sirius grasps for a moment at what to say, the honesty catching him sharply off-guard. 

“I could be persuaded to schedule him in each month. Takes two, you know.” Sirius intends for his shit-eating grin to land more heavily, but Remus is apparently immune to deep-seated charm and instead surges forward to take Sirius into another deep kiss. He responds with fervor, tasting Remus, breathing him in, inundating himself with all the abject loveliness rolling off the body against him like perfect coastal fog. 

“They don’t know there are two of us, they think it’s the same hound,” Remus pants when he pulls back next for an extra dose of air. Sirius is taken by the way Remus’ collar bones stand out against his skin, and so he attaches his mouth to them in wordless worship for several moments to Remus’ audible approval.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t notice the ocean suddenly turn pink.” There’s a harshness in his voice Sirius doesn’t consciously intend to put there, but it’s there and he adores the way Remus presses closer to him for it. 

—

“Agreed.” Remus dives back in against Sirius’ lips and revels again in the taste of him. Sirius responds with just as much vigor, if not  _ more _ that Remus craves to match, to back Remus up until he leans against the wall. Remus buries his hands in Sirius’ hair and makes an intrigued sound when the softness of it glides through his fingers; clenching, pulling, the acuity of eager intensity like a knife to his lungs. It’s so necessary, so overwhelming—it’s been too long since Remus last kissed somebody and he feels his heart rising in him with wolfish instinct,  _ Taste him, memorize him, _ shifting his weight like a tussle on the forest floor to switch Sirius around to be the one leaning on the wall.

They kiss like a storm surge, all tongue and breath and teeth now, Remus’ mouth harmless but purposeful on a black dog’s neck. Sirius’ vim is palpable with the way he kisses deeply, sweetly, so painfully sweetly beneath the heat, and when Remus slides a hand under Sirius’ jumper to touch at the skin of his waist he groans with encouragement before flipping them around again to kiss Remus with renewed purchase back against the wall with a possessive hand cupping Remus’ jaw. The cheap wallpaper scratches at the back of Remus’ head and neck but he doesn’t care, sheds his coat like a second skin, invites the response of Sirius’ palms feeling up beneath his sweater to trade their touch like the most sacred barter. They taste one another again and again with warm insistence and sounds of desperation that are becoming less and less subtle; Sirius is pressed so close that Remus can feel their heartbeats careening together through his own ribcage. Remus feels the adrenal flow of trading breath between them and again has a stuttering flash of thought to the wolf and the dog—flashes of thoughts of them running together but as men, bare feet on the forest floor instead of paws, windswept coastal trees sliding past their limbs, they’re free, they’re  _ free _ . He throws his head back against the wall when Sirius palms him through his trousers and eases down to his knees.

—

Sirius’ higher thought shuts off the moment he touches Remus. He decides that he wants Remus in his mouth immediately despite the plans of getting him into the bedroom, but Sirius’ heart is clamoring for closeness no matter the setting and he’s ready to build their pleasure in whichever room that hasty tower will stand. He goes to his knees and fumbles at Remus’ belt buckle, helped along by Remus’ own clumsy fingers with a sound of thanks Sirius manages to make low in his throat.

Closing his eyes as he closes his lips around Remus’ ready length, Sirius is awash with satisfaction. Remus knits both hands into Sirius’ hair in encouraging fistfuls and instructs Sirius with surprisingly delectable interjections of approval and filthy motivation. It goes straight to Sirius’ own burgeoning limit and he hastily undoes his own trousers to bring himself along at the same time without slowing his oral attentions. Remus is utterly intoxicating—looking down at Sirius with those hazed eyes like eternity themselves, hoarse voice like a cracked reed, legs trembling slightly like strong branches. After what feels like not nearly long enough for all that Sirius wants to do to him, Remus tugs him back up to kiss him, taste himself, put his hand to Sirius with automatic hunger to feel him with a beatific sigh that scratches at his vocal cords like bow rosin.

They slide themselves together in a hold made from both of their hands, fingers wrapped around each other in a single grip to press and slide their progress against one another with the slightly stuttering pace of craving need. Remus nips at his lips and throat and earlobes and  _ fuck,  _ Sirius thinks acutely of running with him again, the toss of the two hounds, the snarl and sharp-edged playfulness of tossing one another around on the tamped-down pines—it’s hasty, it’s heady, still clothed and sure to be only the first of many encounters, and Sirius finds himself at his limit sooner than he wants to be.

“Remus,” he pleads, tries to dredge up more words but can only shape his thoughts around Remus’ name, saint’s name, patron god of the forest floor.

“Come.” Remus is panting just as heavily and Sirius loses his grip on reality at the command, squeezes his eyes shut, and lets go to spill with a cry between their bodies. His vision goes haywire white as he coasts up and out on his crest, listens to Remus reach his own brink and spend richly as well, growling slightly with his gasp that further reduces Sirius’ knees to water as the sound brushes over and past his ear.

The two lean on one another, catching their breath, neither able to speak for several moments.

“Give me a bit and I’ll be back up for more,” Sirius rasps, wordlessly spelling his hands clean so he can run his fingers lazily over the sweat-rimed curls at Remus’ temples.

“Mm.” Remus’ hum into Sirius’ shoulder is affirmative, surrounded by the heavy breaths of returning to the land of the living.

“Give me more than a bit and I’ll be back up for  _ much  _ more.”

“Mm.” Again affirmative, and Remus drags his own right hand up Sirius’ back to twist a long lock of hair around his forefinger with lazy satisfaction.

Trying his luck, if he’s even got any according to fucking seaside folklore, Sirius tries for one last blessing; “Stay the night and I’ll be the one making  _ you _ breakfast and coffee.”

“Dogs can’t cook.” Remus’ voice is wholly exhausted but thick with humor, and Sirius smirks to himself.

“Never said it would be cooked breakfast. Rabbits, a la forest in the wee hours of the morning. Say, three or four weeks from now?”

Remus’ shoulders are the first part of him to shake with mirth before his laughter even makes sound and Sirius can’t help but join him. He never would let himself believe he could feel camaraderie like this here amid all his slinking about—perhaps, if the stars aren’t all as awful as his family’s namesakes would make them out to be, this is why he never could bring himself to up and leave the town. Perhaps he’s always been meant to find Remus, to discover small moments like this; real understanding.

As the waning moon rises beyond the bottle-glass window on the other side of the tiny walkup, as the paint finally dries on Sirius’ front door— _ BAD DOG,  _ indelible as the hound twisted into his veins like silver thread—as Sirius wraps his arms around Remus’ shoulders and laughs for no reason besides the ecstatic discovery of true commiseration in this knothole town in the middle of the sea, his heart pulls like the tide toward something that feels like warmth for the first time he can recall.

  
  


_ —fin— _


End file.
